Shakespeare in the Park

Slate ^ | June 29, 2005 | Bryan Curtis

[nickcarraway]

Shakespeare in the Park is the most culturally affirming rite of summer. No other family outing is as likely to smother mom, dad, and junior in a soothing intellectual balm, a sense of having done something important. It's ironic, then, that part of the appeal of Shakespeare in the Park is its negligible demand on the brain. One need not know anything about Shakespeare going in, and, if my experience in Central Park Sunday night is any indication, one will not know much more going out. As I left As You Like It, I had only a sketchy grasp of Rosalind's big speech at the end, and a vague notion of the machinations of Duke Frederick's court, but I was suffering an unusual amount of self-approbation.

How did a nation come to expect free Shakespeare? And why must we watch it in the park? This peculiar mandate can be traced to Joseph Papp, the mercurial producer who founded a Shakespeare workshop in New York's Lower East Side in 1954. Papp had fallen in love with the Bard when, as a young Brooklyn wisenheimer, he had been asked by a teacher to memorize a few lines from Julius Caesar. ("Wherefore rejoice? What conquest brings he home?") A free Shakespeare company, he thought, could provide similar uplift to the unlettered. "I wanted to reach audiences who might never have seen a play before and who were unable or unwilling to pay," he wrote. Papp had one persistent problem: He had no money to stage his shows or pay his actors.

New York has endured merciless altruists before, but never one quite so clever. Indeed, as Papp's Shakespeare troupe wandered about the city—it performed for a time on a stage built on the back of a truck—its nobility increased.